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My friends know that when it comes to Apple stuff – ask John, he’ll know. I don’t say that to be cocky or to presume I know everything about the company, but I do read a fair bit of information on it pretty regularly, so to say I have more knowledge than the common person is true.

So Apple releases this awesome new iPhone. Great, cool, wonderful. Some dude realizes “Oh, If I take my huge ass hand and cover the entire fucking antenna of the phone, I lose bars”. So he makes a video. It goes viral, at least in the Apple rumor circle anyway.

Thus the phrase that actually makes me cringe was born: iPhone Reception Issue.

From this point, everyone and their mother starts getting involved. People start making videos, commenting on blogs and posting in forums. “Look – when I smother the entire phone in my sweaty hands, the phone loses reception”.

Steve Jobs responds to a customer complaint email basically saying “Don’t hold the phone that way”. This didn’t go over too well but it was quickly supplemented by an actual Apple press release stating that to a degree, covering the phone will cause a reduction in signal, etc.”

What many failed to do (and realize) is that every experiment involved covering the phone as it sat on a table, etc. When I tried it, and successfully reproduced the problem, I made a phone call and it worked fine.

Then the usual complaints… the iPhone sucks, it’s AT&T’s fault, I want my money back, Apple give me a free case, etc. Then my favorite part: the class action law suit. Part of Apple’s reputation of making excellent, damn near perfect products is that people know they make excellent, damn near perfect products. When the slightest problem starts, they get sued. I don’t remember who said it, but on Twitter I saw a post that said “When I have a problem with my car, I take it to get fixed, I don’t sue Honda”.

Today, Apple released a statement that said that (like I expected), the “reception issue” is actually a display bug in the way that the bars are calculated. Surprisingly, they said that the amount of bars you see probably are too high and that a software update is coming with a new way of calculating this. Great. So it’s not a hardware problem, it’ll be fixed.

What does the news get out of this: “Apple admits to iPhone reception issue”.

No… there’s a difference. And it angers me that people don’t see it.

I was totally mistaken.

iPhone applications look awful on the iPad. They are either too small when at their native resolution or look stretched and out of proportion when magnified to fill the screen. That being said, I now only use iPad apps when using the device.

Here’s a list of some of the apps I’m still waiting for…

1. Twitter for iPad. After Twitter decided to purchase Atebits and rebrand Tweetie, there was speculation that an iPad version would be right around the corner. It still isn’t. Twitterrific is okay at best, in my opinion. I’m excited and anxiously waiting to see what Twitter comes up with.
2. Facebook. I’m really at a loss as to why this is not already out. Facebook has really been at the front line of introducing mobile applications. There’s whispers that the lack of a native application is because Apple and Facebook are working to integrate Facebook into the iPhone OS. I think that’s crap. I don’t want to have to search through a bunch of different applications to find events, photos, and contact information. It should all be in one place – in one native application. That simple.
3. Foursquare. I’m relatively new to the location-based networking game but I’m very happy with Foursquare so far. Gowalla, the other major competitor, was quick to jump on the iPad bandwagon and developed a gorgeous application. While some argue that there is not much need for an iPad app for a largely mobile concept, I think it would be a great way to discover new places, communicate with friends, etc.
4. Reeder. There’s hundreds if not thousands of RSS readers available, and the number is even starting to become insane on the iPad. I’v e become accustomed to switching between Google Reader’s web application and The Early Edition, a novel app concept that displays your feeds as part of a newspaper. Reeder was always one of the prettier apps with a lot of useful features. Based on the screenshots on their Twitter, it looks like they are close to having an awesome iPad app ready to be released.
5. Remote. Apple’s Remote application is always fun to play with. While it’s not the most necessary thing out there, I could see myself using it more if it was on the iPad. Maybe the integration of a cover flow browsing ability could make it even more useful.
6. Tumblr. I’ve been using Tumblr for about two years now and it’s the only blogging platform (besides WordPress) that I haven’t become bored with. A native iPad application could do well, as the WordPress app has shown us.
7. Chase. Being one of the larger banks out there, I’d expect Chase to release a mobile banking application, similar to the one available on the iPhone. Larger screen real estate could make it possible for more graphical analysis of your accounts, easier bill paying, etc.
8. Google Talk. I’ve only recently started using Google Talk and I love it. They do have a web application, but it sucks. More than just a Google chat application, I’d love to see a chat client that supports AIM, Google Talk, Facebook, etc. protocols but that doesn’t look absolutely hideous.

Originally, it made sense for developers to hold off. They needed to see how the iPad was received in it’s initial days and get some face time with the device to start figuring out how to best utilize it. Now that over two million iPads have been sold around the globe, there’s no more excuses. The iPad is here to stay and if developers want to remain profitable, they better get with it.

A wizard prompts you for your blog’s address, username and password and does the rest. It can even determine the theme your using by publishing a test post, allowing you to “live preview” as you write. The tool works with all major blogging platforms, publishing sites, etc and offers a lot of tools to allow you to publish almost anything.

If you are a Windows user and have Windows 7, check it out.

Update: Windows Live Writer does not support Tumblr.

Having had it for a solid month or so, I can safely say that it has indeed changed the way i consume the internet and the way i do business. I tool it to class and was immediately impressed by it’s ability to replace my laptop for tasks such as note taking, email, document publishing and browsing the web. Bringing it around with me was met with no shortage of questions, oohs and ahhs. Some of my favorite responses griped about how it couldn’t make phone calls or take photos but I generally had good responses to shut people up.

The main question that i was unable to answer was “So was it worth it?”. That was the only one that i couldn’t quickly answer. Thinking about it now, I can say its the best money that I’ve spent on a device that is totally unnecessary. There is nothing that I can do on an iPad that cant easily be accomplished with my Mac or iPhone but it does these basic tasks so well and with a new style which is what continues to make this device fly off shelves.

I’m really excited to see what applications continue to come out, the ones so far have been awesome.

This is usually the time I give some grand sales pitch to my lead investor (named Mom) about how I’ve figured out how to create a site that is going to “be the next Twitter” or something ridiculous along those lines. She usually buys into it and I find myself with three more domain names, a new wordpress installation and a few solid days (or weeks) of coding.

Once the project is done, I usually get bored of it quickly. Either discouraged by the lack of users and interest or my focus being pulled in yet another direction, the site becomes stale and un-updated. On the surface, this seems very foolish. Here I am spending all this money to create a site that I do not use and do not sell or profit from whatsoever.

It took me a while to realize that what I gain is the knowledge of how I created it. While SillyApp or App Store Spotlight might not be sites populated by anyone other that russian spam bots, I learned a lot about various content management systems as well as PHP, MySQL, CSS, HTML, XHTML, WordPress, PHPBB, etc. All of these skills have been used since to help me work on actual websites.

I plan on taking a look at all my projects and finding out what I’ve learned from them. After that, I’ll probably do a big overhaul of my development website and try to tie everything together. From there, I’ll be open for business and start working on a number of websites that I’ve promised.

Since my last post, I started a brand new website project called SillyApp. This site came to me one night and I thought it would be fun to make. I feature the really dumb and hilarious applications found on the iTunes App Store. Still in its early days, it already has over 1,000 daily page views. I haven’t had much time to nurture it the past few weeks but after I finish up a few things in old personal life world, I’ll get back to contributing to it regularly. It’s also one of the first projects that I’m going to be farming out help with. Usually, I keep my websites close to the vest but I have a few people interested in writing for it.

I’ve also been doing a lot of work on my brand itself. I re-designed my entire portfolio website to have a new look. Over the past year, I’ve really learned a lot in terms of website design and realized that my old look didn’t really reflect the way I design and work anymore. So, I started fresh and I’m really happy with the way the design came out.

I also spent some time and re-designed my social brand too. I went for a consistent look throughout all of the main websites I use (that actually allow customization). My Tumblr, Twitter, YouTube and Start.IO pages all now reflect the design that I created for my blog. You can read more about that here.

In other, slightly related news, I now own http://johnthedeveloper.com for another two years!

The most recent project that I’ve been working on is one that strikes two of my interests – web development and EMS. The National Collegiate Emergency Services Foundation provides resources and membership to college students involved in emergency medical services.

Two members recently decided to extend this and start their own forum, NCEMSForum. When I came across this site (after being referred to it by one of my supervisor’s at my college ambulance company), it was in the early stages. I contacted them to see if I could lend a hand and they graciously agreed. After a short stint as an “intern”, I created a brand new theme for them incorporating a simple EMS colored theme that was edgy and had a “college feel” to it as well as a clean and modern look.

The reception has been great and I continue to make it better as the head of their Technical Support staff. Check out their website here.

One of the new features that I will be implementing soon is a “Profile” section. This page will take information that members submit on the registration page and display it on a page that will be much like a profile page on Facebook or MySpace – without all the unnecessary fanciness.

This “cool idea” is no easy task and comes with its fair share of challenges. The first implementation of the information collected on the registration page was relatively simple – a basic members table that shows First Name, Last Name, Email and Graduating Class. This profile page would not just be a dump of information – but an organized and specially formatted way to show more extensive information, such as birthday, union affiliations, user choices and selections, etc.

The way that I wanted to do this was in the most streamlined and organized way. Instead of creating a new page for each member (which would waste valuable bandwidth, server space and time) I would create one profile page that would pull information for the selected member.

For example:

http://thepart.org/profile.php?id=1

This would pull specific information for the member with the ID of 1.

Right now, I’m working to get all this information organized into a pretty table and then I need to integrate the code that will open the database and use the ID number entered in the URL to call up a specific user’s information.

I will post a more detailed explanation of how I accomplish this as I get it done, testing and implemented into the real world environment of the website.

What I have begun to notice is the trends in the way in which people use email. There are two main philosophies. The first is the one that is not like me – those that treat email like a text message, deleting it after sending a message or reading it.

The second is the group that I fall into. I keep almost every email with some kind of information that is useful in it – which means almost everything except spam, messages from Facebook and codes to get free cookies with any order. I have a paper trail of emails from companies, banks, schools and much more. Not only do I save incoming messages, but more important, I save outgoing messages.

On more than one occasion, I’ve had to go in and find a message from months ago to win a bet, prove a point or remind someone of something important. Lately, I’ve had to change my strategy a little with my school email account. The quota you are provided is 50MB. Yes, 50MB. My MobileMe account has 10GB and my Gmail account is virtually unlimited. Granted, I won’t ever need this (unless I start some business where people email me full length, uncompressed movies). Today, I had to go in a delete over 200 messages which made me feel really weird.

I think schools and businesses should recognize the importance of email communication and I think I should have more space!

I was asked to design and maintain a website for the alumni association of my high school. Since this project is for something that is very near and dear to me (they help out theatre alumni and they gave me a nice scholarship when I graduated), I was more than happy to work on this.

The project has progressed nicely and after only a few weeks, the website has been discovered by hundreds of alumni, many of which have already registered to have their name, contact information, headshots and resumes added to the database.

The website can be found at http://thepart.org

I’m really happy with the way it came out and am glad to have an active project being so well received.